Rifters 4 - Blindsight (14 page)

Acceptable risks. If we hadn't been up for them, we might as well have stayed home.

And so we waited: four optimized hybrids somewhere past the threshold of mere humanity, one extinct predator who'd opted to command us instead of eating us alive. We waited for
Rorschach
to come back around the bend. The probe fell smoothly around the well, an ambassador to the unwilling—or, if the Gang was right, maybe just a back-door artist set to B&E an empty condo. Szpindel had named it
Jack-in-the-box
, after some antique child's toy that didn't even rate a listing in ConSensus; we fell in its wake, nearly ballistic now, momentum and inertia carefully precalculated to thread us through the chaotic minefield of Ben's accretion belt.

Kepler couldn't do it all, though;
Theseus
grumbled briefly now and then, the intermittent firing of her attitude jets rumbling softly up the spine as the Captain tweaked our descent into the Maelstrom.

No plan ever survives contact with the enemy
I remembered, but I didn't know from where.

"Got it," Bates said. A speck appeared at Ben's edge; the display zoomed instantly to closeup. "Proximity boot."

Rorschach
remained invisible to
Theseus
, close as we were, close as we were coming. But parallax stripped at least some of the scales from the probe's eyes; it woke to spikes and spirals of smoky glass flickering in and out of view, Ben's flat endless horizon semivisible through the intervening translucence. The view trembled; waveforms rippled across ConSensus.

"Quite the magnetic field," Szpindel remarked.

"Braking," Bates reported. Jack turned smoothly retrograde and fired its torch. On Tactical, delta-vee swung to red.

Sascha was driving the Gang's body this shift. "Incoming signal," she reported. "Same format."

Sarasti clicked. "Pipe it."

"
Rorschach
to
Theseus
. Hello again,
Theseus
." The voice was female this time, and middle-aged.

Sascha grinned "See? She's not offended at all. Big hairy dick notwithstanding."

"Don't answer," Sarasti said.

"Burn complete," Bates reported.

Coasting now, Jack—
sneezed
. Silver chaff shot into the void towards the target: millions of compass needles, brilliantly reflective, fast enough to make
Theseus
seem slow. They were gone in an instant. The probe watched them flee, swept laser eyes across every degree of arc, scanned its sky twice a second and took careful note of each and every reflective flash. Only at first did those needles shoot along anything approaching a straight line: then they swept abruptly into Lorentz spirals, twisted into sudden arcs and corkscrews, shot away along new and intricate trajectories bordering on the relativistic. The contours of
Rorschach
's magnetic field resolved in ConSensus, at first glance like the nested layers of a glass onion.

"
Sproinnnng
," Szpindel said.

At second glance the onion grew wormy. Invaginations appeared, long snaking tunnels of energy proliferating fractally at every scale.

"
Rorschach
to
Theseus
. Hello,
Theseus
. You there?"

A holographic inset beside the main display plotted the points of a triangle in flux:
Theseus
at the apex,
Rorschach
and Jack defining the narrow base.

"
Rorschach
to
Theseus
. I
seeee
you...."

"She's got a more casual affect than
he
ever did." Sascha glanced up at Sarasti, and did not add
You sure about this?
She was starting to wonder herself, though. Starting to dwell on the potential consequences of being
wrong
, now that we were committed. As far as sober second thought was concerned it was too little too late; but for Sascha, that was progress.

Besides, it had been Sarasti's decision.

Great hoops were resolving in
Rorschach
's magnetosphere. Invisible to human eyes, their outlines were vanishingly faint even on Tactical; the chaff had scattered so thinly across the sky that even the Captain was resorting to guesswork. The new macrostructures hovered in the magnetosphere like the nested gimbals of some great phantom gyroscope.

"I see you haven't changed your vector,"
Rorschach
remarked. "We really wouldn't advise continuing your approach. Seriously. For your own safety."

Szpindel shook his head. "Hey, Mandy.
Rorschach
talking to Jack at all?"

"If it is, I'm not seeing it. No incident light, no directed EM of any kind." She smiled grimly. "Seems to have snuck in under the radar. And don't call me Mandy."

Theseus
groaned, twisting. I staggered in the low pseudograv, reached out to steady myself. "Course correction," Bates reported. "Unplotted rock."

"
Rorschach
to
Theseus
. Please respond. Your current heading is unacceptable, repeat, your current heading is
unacceptable
.
Strongly
advise you change course."

By now the probe coasted just a few kilometers off
Rorschach
's leading edge. That close it served up way more than magnetic fields: it presented
Rorschach
itself in bright, tactical color codes. Invisible curves and spikes iridesced in ConSensus across any number of on-demand pigment schemes: gravity, reflectivity, blackbody emissions. Massive electrical bolts erupting from the tips of thorns rendered in lemon pastels. User-friendly graphics had turned
Rorschach
into a cartoon.

"
Rorschach
to
Theseus
. Please respond."

Theseus
growled to stern, fishtailing. On tactical, another just-plotted piece of debris swept by a discreet six thousand meters to port.

"
Rorschach
to
Theseus
. If you are unable to respond, please—
holy shit!
"

The cartoon flickered and died.

I'd seen what had happened in that last instant, though: Jack passing near one of those great phantom hoops; a tongue of energy flicking out, quick as a frog's; a dead feed.

"I see what you're up to
now
, you
cocksuckers
. Do you think we're fucking
blind
down here?"

Sascha clenched her teeth. "We—"

"No," Sarasti said.

"But it
fi
—"

Sarasti
hissed
, from somewhere in the back of his throat. I had never heard a mammal make a noise quite like that before. Sascha fell immediately silent.

Bates negotiated with her controls. "I've still got—just a sec—"

"You pull that thing back
right fucking now
, you hear us?
Right fucking now.
"

"
Got it
." Bates gritted as the feed came back up. "Just had to reacquire the laser." The probe had been kicked wildly off-course—as if someone fording a river had been caught in sudden undertow and thrown over a waterfall—but it was still talking, and still mobile.

Barely. Bates struggled to stay the course. Jack staggered and wobbled uncontrollably though the tightly-wound folds of
Rorschach
's magnetosphere. The artefact loomed huge in its eye. The feed strobed.

"Maintain approach," Sarasti said calmly.

"Love to," Bates gritted. "Trying."

Theseus
skidded again, corkscrewing. I could have sworn I heard the bearings in the drum
grind
for a moment. Another rock sailed past on Tactical.

"I thought you'd
plotted
those things," Szpindel grumbled.

"
You want to start a war, Theseus
? Is that what you're trying to do? You think you're up for it?"

"It doesn't attack," Sarasti said.

"Maybe it does." Bates kept her voice low; I could see the effort it took. "If
Rorschach
can control the trajectories of these—"

"Normal distribution. Insignificant corrections." He must have meant statistically: the torque and grind of the ship's hull felt pretty significant to the others.

"Oh, right,"
Rorschach
said suddenly. "We get it
now
. You don't think there's anyone here, do you? You've got some high-priced consultant telling you there's nothing to worry about."

Jack was deep in the forest. We'd lost most of the tactical overlays to reduced baud. In dim visible light
Rorschach
's great ridged spines, each the size of a skyscraper, hashed a nightmare view on all sides. The feed stuttered as Bates struggled to keep the beam aligned. ConSensus painted walls and airspace with arcane telemetry. I had no idea what any of it meant.

"You think we're nothing but a
Chinese Room
,"
Rorschach
sneered.

Jack stumbled towards collision, grasping for something to hang on to.

"Your mistake,
Theseus
."

It hit something. It stuck.

And suddenly
Rorschach
snapped into view—no refractory composites, no profiles or simulations in false color. There it was at last, naked even to Human eyes.

Imagine a crown of thorns, twisted, dark and unreflective, grown too thickly tangled to ever rest on any human head. Put it in orbit around a failed star whose own reflected half-light does little more than throw its satellites into silhouette. Occasional bloody highlights glinted like dim embers from its twists and crannies; they only emphasized the darkness everywhere else.

Imagine an artefact that embodies the very notion of torture, something so wrenched and disfigured that even across uncounted lightyears and unimaginable differences in biology and outlook, you can't help but feel that somehow, the structure itself is in pain.

Now make it the size of a city.

It flickered as we watched. Lightning arced from recurved spines a thousand meters long. ConSensus showed us a strobe-lit hellscape, huge and dark and twisted. The composites had lied. It was not the least bit beautiful.

"Now it's too late," something said from deep inside. "Now every last one of you is dead. And Susan? You there, Susan?

"We're taking you
first.
"

"Life's too short for chess."

—
Byron

They never sealed the hatch behind them. It was too easy to get lost up there in the dome, naked infinite space stretching a hundred eighty degrees on every axis. They needed all that emptiness but they needed an anchor in its midst: soft stray light from astern, a gentle draft from the drum, the sounds of people and machinery close by. They needed to have it both ways.

I lay in wait. Reading a dozen blatant cues in their behavior, I was already squirreled away in the forward airlock when they passed. I gave them a few minutes and crept forward to the darkened bridge.

"Of course they called her by name," Szpindel was saying. "That was the only name they had. She
told
them, remember?"

"Yes." Michelle didn't seem reassured.

"Hey, it was
you
guys said we were talking to a Chinese Room. You saying you were wrong?"

"We—no. Of course not."

"Then it wasn't really threatening Suze at all, was it? It wasn't threatening any of us. It had no idea what it was saying."

"It's
rule-based
, Isaac. It was following some kind of flowchart it drew up by observing Human languages in action. And somehow those rules told it to respond with threats of violence."

"But if it doesn't even know what it was saying—"

"It doesn't. It can't. We parsed the phrasing nineteen different ways, tried out conceptual units of every different length..." A long, deep breath. "But it attacked the probe, Isaac."

"Jack just got too close to one of those electrode thingies is all. It just arced."

"So you don't think
Rorschach
is hostile?"

Long silence—long enough to make me wonder if I'd been detected.

"
Hostile
," Szpindel said at last. "
Friendly
. We learned those words for life on Earth, eh? I don't know if they even apply out here." His lips smacked faintly. "But I think it might be something
like
hostile."

Michelle sighed. "Isaac, there's no
reason
for—I mean, it just doesn't make
sense
that it would be. We can't have anything it wants."

"It says it wants to be left alone," Szpindel said. "Even if it doesn't mean it."

They floated quietly for a while, up there past the bulkhead.

"At least the shielding held," Szpindel said finally. "That's something." He wasn't just talking about Jack; our own carapace was coated with the same stuff now. It had depleted our substrate stockpiles by two thirds, but no one wanted to rely on the ship's usual magnetics in the face of anything that could play so easily with the electromagnetic spectrum.

"If they attack us, what do we do?" Michelle said.

"Learn what we can, while we can. Fight back. While we can."

"
If
we can. Look out there, Isaac. I don't care how
embryonic
that thing is. Tell me we're not hopelessly outmatched."

"Outmatched, for sure.
Hopelessly
, never."

"That's not what you said before."

"Still. There's always a way to win."

"If I said that, you'd call it wishful thinking."

"If you said that, it would be. But I'm saying it, so it's game theory."

"Game theory again. Jesus, Isaac."

"No, listen. You're thinking about the aliens like they were some kind of mammal. Something that
cares
, something that looks after its investments."

"How do you know they aren't?"